Sending payments

This guide provides an overview of the process of sending and tracking a payment to completion, regardless of the scheme it's sent over. To learn how to submit a payment for a specific scheme, see our scheme-specific guides:

• Send a Faster Payment
• Send a book transfer

info

If you do not specify which payment scheme you want to use, we will automatically select the cheapest immediate payment rail. For payments within your organisation, that is a book transfer. For external payments, that is Faster Payments (FPS).

There are three steps to making a payment:

1. Create a payment
2. Submit the payment
3. Track the submission

there are two approaches to tracking submissions:

1. Create a webhook and listen for submission events.
2. Poll the submission resource.

• Webhook based tracking
• Poll based tracking

The sequence diagram below captures the payment submission lifecycle using webhooks.

caution

Webhook events may be sent out of order.